Minimizing the Age of Information through Queues

TL;DR

This paper introduces and analyzes the LGFS scheduling policy to minimize the age of information in queueing systems, proving its optimality under certain conditions and demonstrating its broad applicability.

Contribution

It presents the LGFS policy as an age-optimal scheduling strategy for various queueing scenarios, extending the understanding of age minimization.

Findings

Preemptive LGFS is age-optimal with exponential service times.

Non-preemptive LGFS is near-optimal with NBU service times.

LGFS policies are effective for arbitrary packet generation and multi-server systems.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate scheduling policies that minimize the age of information in single-hop queueing systems. We propose a Last-Generated, First-Serve (LGFS) scheduling policy, in which the packet with the earliest generation time is processed with the highest priority. If the service times are i.i.d. exponentially distributed, the preemptive LGFS policy is proven to be age-optimal in a stochastic ordering sense. If the service times are i.i.d. and satisfy a New-Better-than-Used (NBU) distributional property, the non-preemptive LGFS policy is shown to be within a constant gap from the optimum age performance. These age-optimality results are quite general: (i) They hold for arbitrary packet generation times and arrival times (including out-of-order packet arrivals), (ii) They hold for multi-server packet scheduling with the possibility of replicating a packet over multiple servers, (iii) They hold for minimizing not only the time-average age and mean peak age, but also for minimizing the age stochastic process and any non-decreasing functional of the age stochastic process. If the packet generation time is equal to packet arrival time, the LGFS policies reduce to the Last-Come, First-Serve (LCFS) policies. Hence, the age optimality results of LCFS-type policies are also established.